Habits for Success After Weight Loss Surgery

Melbourne’s own bariatric surgeon, Dr. Melissa Beitner gives her top tips for creating habits that lead to weight loss success.

Success is about habits. What you do everyday. Weight loss surgery will enable you to lose a lot of weight quickly. But we’ve all heard of, or know someone who has had weight loss surgery and years later gained the weight back. There are a variety of reasons why this can happen. There are supportive and destructive habits that can have an impact on the success of your surgery.

In The Power Of Habit, Charles Duhigg shows how our daily, mostly unnoticed habits can have profound effects on our lives. It turns out that our mind seeks-out familiarity. We crave habits. When our habits are healthy and positive they can create a tri-athlete or set a career on a path to new heights. When these habits are destructive they can destroy our minds and bodies.

Most of the time, we don’t realise that we’ve created destructive habits. But we all have them. Unhealthy habits can slowly but surely add extra pounds, decrease activity, and get us into destructive relationships with food.

Unfortunately, habits are not always easy to change and can take time. So the time to start changing your habits is before surgery. These 5 simple habit changes that will propel your weight loss journey to success. 

1. Eat at the dinner table and eliminate fast food for good.
2. Eliminate soda (including diet sodas) and dessert
3. Take The Stairs
4. Watch 1 Hour Less TV Per Day
5. No Food After Dinner

Weight loss surgery, be it gastric bypass, sleeve gastrectomy, or a gastric band, is only a tool. The tool of weight loss surgery will get you to a place where you see results, you lose weight, you look and feel better. But after you get there, it’s up to you to keep the weight off.



Changes come from you and the decisions you make. Don’t let those decisions create bad habits. Make those habits healthy and positive. Start today.